PhD Oral Exam - Dorian Jesse Fraser, Art History

When studying for a doctoral degree (PhD), candidates submit a thesis that provides a critical review of the current state of knowledge of the thesis subject as well as the student’s own contributions to the subject. The distinguishing criterion of doctoral graduate research is a significant and original contribution to knowledge.

Once accepted, the candidate presents the thesis orally. This oral exam is open to the public.

Abstract

The New York State Council on the Arts has been a fundamental fixture of public arts funding in the United States since its inception in 1960. Despite a contentious homophobic and anti-Leftist suspicion of public arts funding, the Council provided financial support to emerging queer artists and enabled access to breakthrough media tools for independent media production after the cultural paradigm shift of the Stonewall rebellion. This support, specifically through the NYSCA’s Electronic Media and Film program, would prove crucial to queer storytelling and AIDS activist media during the culture wars of the 1980s and 1990s.

An archival collection of the NYSCA program is now held in institutions across New York State as the NYSCA Electronic Media and Film Memory Archive. Although the purpose of the Memory Archive is to preserve the records and identity of the NYSCA’s EMF program in a study collection, the Council’s ardent support of openly queer media art and AIDS activism is obscured by organizational issues such as multiple institutional repositories and suffers from a paucity of institutional history. Reading the materials of the Memory Archive for the presence of queer media from gay liberation through the AIDS crisis requires confronting the absence of meaningful institutional address of queerness and HIV and AIDS, despite support for revolutionary media activism and storytelling across the agency.

To combat this archival malformation, I propose a ‘queer archiviology’: a method that allows for the necessary movement between practical and conceptual applications to create generative queer genealogical potential in existing institutional archives. This hybridity is achieved through the prioritization of both grassroots archival methods and professional practices in the embodied realm of the queer researcher-archivist, enabling lateral archival extensions that push against discrete divisions between archival collections to instead pursue queer kinship. These familial resemblances between objects, texts and traces of the queer world-making and AIDS activist art supported by the NYSCA are established across and in between institutions. This method is invoked as an expansive genealogical mapping project in the contemporary moment as a continuing intervention in the existing collections of the Memory Archive.